Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

tive, which to the spectator appears to be stationary, though in fact rushing straight towards him at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour. In fact, it was the stationary character of these spangles of light, which corroborated the accuracy with which the radiant point had been determined by the intersections of the trains of other meteors.

we possess no arithmetic which could convey any intelligible conception of the number of the miles. But so it is; and, as certain as it is, that a well instructed observer, by analysing light, can detect the material nature of the source from whence it comes, whether it be from the combustion of iron, or nickel, or magnesium, or sodium; so certain it is, that the light from the sun and from the stars, indicates the combustion of these very metals, in those bodies which otherwise we must have considered, for such purposes, hopelessly remote. It is not a little satisfactory then to find that so soon as we are un

From a discussion of the records of eleven instances of November star-showers, which have been observed between the years A.D. 902, and A.D. 1833, it appears that every thirty-three years the shower may be expected to recur, and on each occasion, perhaps, a day later than that of the pre-expectedly able to handle masses of matter, which ceding display. But inasmuch as star-showers are recorded to have occurred in the years 931 and 934, and again in the two successive years 1832 and 1833; there is ground for expecting the recurrence of these November meteors for two or three years in succession. For this reason no doubt a good look-out will be kept in the year 1867. The present star-shower will probably have been observed with greater intelligence and accuracy than any preceding one, and consequently some notable increase of our knowledge of these rings of planetary dust, may now fairly be anticipated. When the elements, that is to say, the dimensions, positions, and variable thicknesses or densities of these rings, shall have been determined, then it will be possible to predict with certainty the epochs, and durations, and terrestial places of visibility, of each starshower. But all this, though now in progress, remains yet to be done.

We come finally to the question, what is the material, what is the mineral constitution of these strange bodies? We have already observed that they sometimes split into pieces high in the mid-air, and occasionally strew the ground in their fall. We shall not now stop to give a catalogue of instances; they may be found elsewhere, and specimens may be seen in almost every museum of any consequence. On submitting them to chemical analysis they are found to consist most frequently of iron in a metallic and malleable, and not in an oxidized state; the iron is in general mixed with nickel, and there are various compounds of magnesia and silica, and in some instances just those very ingredients which are seen in the trap and basaltic rocks of our own earth. These fiery messengers then, bring with them tidings from the chill, distant regions of space, that matter therein abounds similar to the matter which constitutes what lies below the crust of our own planet. But not only so, the positive handling and the actual analysis of this in- | terplanetary, or, it may after all occasionally be, this interstellar matter, serves only to confirm what modern skill has been able to detect regarding the material constitution of the stars, nay of the very sun himself. It might seem a bold and a strange assertion to state that we possess any certaiu knowledge of the mineral constitution of bodies so inconceivably remote from us that we have no means to measure their distances, and if we had the means

are the neighbours and the congeners of the sun and of the stars, rather than of ourselves and of our own planetary home, we find all our scientific conjectures verified, and we extract the very iron, and the very magnesium, and the very materials from the meteor planets, which we saw on fire with our own eyes in the mid-air, and which we shrewdly guessed constitute the fires of the centre of our universe, and of those lesser lamps which are too remote even to feel the might of his influence. Thus suns and stars and comets, and nebulæ, and the meteoric dust which is sometimes spread upon our fields, are all bound together in one common material relationship.

But these are not all the tales which these messengers from the realms of space can tell us, for they bear within themselves further records of their own history. They carry with them unquestionable indications, that at one period they were like the photosphere of the sun, in the state of gas, in the state of intensely heated incandescent gas. As to whence came that heat, or whence came they where they are found in those mysterious revolving rings, no philosopher as yet has been endued with genius adequate to the unravelment of the mystery. When these things are known, if that time ever comes, then we shall know more of the origin of the earth we live on, and of the sun which cherishes and sustains it. The mystery is probably locked up in those half-burnt, strange-looking masses, which are now lying unobserved by thousands who pass by, in the British Museum. Who shall fashion the key?

It has been already stated that the meteor trains assumed various hues; by which we mean that the colours varied from pale straw to bright orange, and from whitish to bright and decided blue, nor were there wanting various shades of red. On some occasions changes of colour were observed in the same meteor, as for instance, from straw colour, through orange, to blue at the final disappearance of the train. Moreover, it was not an uncommon circumstance to see a gradual increase up to a maximum, and then a diminution both in the brightness and the thickness of the train; the sheaf of sparks thus assuming the shape of an elongated spindle. All these phenomena both of colour and of form appear to indicate the combustion and vaporisation of the various materials of which the meteors were composed. The combustion of the

metals, such as iron and nickel, might account for the redder tints, while the magnesian and aluminous earthy matters, might give rise to the yellow and the blue. Attempts were, in fact, made by one of the ablest and most philosophical of our observers, to determine by spectrum analysis, the constituents of the incandescent trains, but unfortunately in this instance with little success; and yet that such an attempt is feasible, appears from the fact that it has been found perfectly practicable to detect at least some of the ingredients of which rockets are composed, by the above method of experiment.

We have said that these meteoric masses carry with them much of the records of their own history; they also carry with them some records of the places where they have been. It is related of at least one of these stones, as they are called, that for a long time after its fall it was impossible to touch it, by reason of the—the reader will naturally expect to find the heat; but ro, quite the reverse-the cold, which was insufferably intense. Now this (except to science) unexpected fact carries with it the evidence of two things. The first is the evidence of the intense cold, the utter negation of all heat, in the interplanetary spaces where the stone had been for ages wont to move. But not only so; Dr. Tyndall has recently shown, that were it not for the canopy of watery vapour which envelopes our earth, it would, during the night, become by radiation so intensely cold that nothing endued with life could survive. These meteoric stones

[ocr errors]

have no atmospheres, and so they are chilled indeed; and when they fall, although their surfaces for a time retain the heat of their fusion, they sometimes carry with them at the core, the temperature of the distant homes from whence they come. But now, reader-now comes that impatient, ever-recurring, ever-intrusive question, Cui bono? Well, if for nothing else, these things exist for us to look at, and to guess at, not to wonder at. They exist at all events, lest cotton, and rail-roads, and banks, and shares, and Bessemer steel, engross all our thoughts, and at last reduce us lower than the senselessness of a meteoric lump. But thus existing as they do, they serve also to sharpen and improve that bright ethereal gift of God, wherewith for some high purposes His creatures are endowed, the human mind. And that human mind, when thus improved, grows in knowledge; and knowledge, rightly directed, grows up into admiration, and admiration kindles into love. Three hundred years ago, when the fiery rain shot along the skies, men were appalled, and they hid themselves in terror, fearing that the crack of doom was at their heels :a few weeks ago, when the very stars seemed to fall from their courses, thousands of God's wellinstructed creatures looked steadily at the fiery spectacle, not only without a shudder, but they felt, or they might have felt, like children peacefully walking up and down in a Father's abode, and gazing with joy at the bright treasures in a Father's house.

THE PAST REQUIRED BY GOD.

BY THE EDITOR.

"And God requireth that which is past."

THE past! we speak of it as we are wont to do of the dead, and say, "It is all over." Past ages are thought of as cemeteries in which human beings and events lie buried in eternal oblivion, leaving behind them only a few crumbling remains for the curious antiquary to examine and describe. The present alone is real; for the future is dark, and the past annihilated. Good men are disposed to forget the past in their eager longing for a more glorious future: bad men wish to forget it, for spectres come to them sometimes from it, and they seek enjoyment in the present, or try to secure it for the immediate future. But "God requireth that which is past"-and, depend upon it, what He requires shall answer to his call, and be found.

It is very strange, when we reflect upon it, that the past should be so unreal to us, for it was and is, and for ever shall be, whereas the future is not, and the present only is.

Consider for a moment how wonderfully indestructible are material things. We see in them the process of change, but never that of annihilation. "What is our life?" says St. James. "It is even

a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." The image thus selected to describe the frailty of man, conveys to us a most vivid impression of a substance existing, and then apparently ceasing to be. We see vapour one moment hanging in the air as a cloud, or flowing down the hoary heads of the old hills like snowy locks, and the next absorbed and lost in the warm air. But soon a chill blast drives it forth, and it becomes cloud again, grows dark and heavy, and then dissolves in showers, reflecting the glories of the rainbow, passing through the dull earth in tiny streams of water, swelling into majestic rivers, then joining the mighty ocean, and rolling along in mountain billows. If breathed upon by the freezing North, it becomes ice, solid and silent as a rock. But when thawed again and confined in an iron boiler heated by fire, it grows into a power so irresistible that it drives proud navies over the impetuous waves, and in the teeth of the fiercest hurricanes. As it escapes from its prison into the air, it dies, Samson-like, from the very effort which displayed its strength.

And as water thus pursues its ceaseless course from ocean to sky, and from sky to ocean, ever changing, yet never ceasing to be, so it is with all other material things. All of them have a past, and a past which God can at any time require, and which He ever sees in the present. His past creations in this world all remain in some form or other. The old forests are preserved in the great beds of coal which feed our grates and furnaces. The old ocean wonders are preserved in our mountains. The marvels of chemistry, sometimes gentle and silent as the freezing of a quiet pool, sometimes terrible with the gigantic forces which poured forth lava streams and upheaved continents, rent the mountains asunder, and sent the ocean foaming over their proud summits;-all these agencies of the past live in the world on which we tread, in the hills on which we pasture our flocks, in the earth we till, in the minerals we manufacture for our use, and in the scenery on which we gaze with rapture and delight. Not a flower which bloomed or scented the air in Eden but is in some still existing form known to its Creator. Not a cup of cold water given in love by the poor to the poor, but lives-physically as well as morally-in the universe of God.

And if from the physical world we turn to the moral world, the world of history made up of what once living men said or did, what is past of it? Euter an Egyptian tomb, and there realize how the long past yet visibly lives. Thousands of years have fled; man's life, which seems to us so long, has been repeated a hundred times in succession, since the persons lived who lie around us here. Yet see the marks of the chisel on the walls; the painting half finished, and the outline that was to have been filled up in a few days, still waiting for the finishing touch of the master; read the thoughts about life and death, about time and eternity, pour trayed in the coloured story. Look also at the man who built the tomb! You can unwind the cerements of the grave, the fine linen of Egypt, from his body; you can grasp the hand that has not been grasped since wife or child grasped it forty centuries ago, and touch the eyelids that opened once with wonder and admiration on the pomp and power of the Pharaohs. How all this impresses us

with the life of the past!

minds and hearts, to depart from them no more for ever!

Nor have any events in human history become so past as to have perished. All that men have done lives in what men now possess, as really as the blood of our common ancestry flows in our veins. The battles for freedom may be past, but though the warriors who fought them sleep in their graves, and their victorious tramp disturbs no more the quiet battle plain, yet they live in the present liberty which they secured to happy, though often forgetful and ungrateful nations. Unrecorded on the page of history are ten thousand honoured names of whom the world was not worthy, but the spirit which they possessed and have transmitted endures in the life of their respective nations. Passed from our knowledge are most who thought, discovered, and suffered for the world; but they are present in our enjoyment of new possessions, in the blessings of our advanced civilisation, and in our treasures of truth, peace, and eternal good. Abraham is not past, nor Moses, nor Paul, nor the teachers of the early Church, nor the conquerors and civilizers of kingdoms, nor the discoverers of America, nor the inventors of printing, nor the great Protestant Reformers, nor the enlightened legislators, nor the zealous missionaries, nor the self-denying philanthropists, whose forms are seen no more, whose voices are silent, and whose names never disturb the air. They rest from their labours, and their works do follow them! Their past is not dead; it lives, and God constantly requires it.

But let us look at this fact more with reference to ourselves, so as to receive some profit from a right consideration of it, at this the end of one year and the beginning of another.

God will require from each of us some account of our past lives. Our wonderful existence is given us for a great and blessed purpose,-that we may love and serve God, and thus possess true life and joy with Him here and for ever. I will not distract you by any speculations as to the form in which this purpose can in any degree be attained, through the Spirit of God and under the universal government of Christ, by those who have not our measure of revelation. Let us rather seek to feel the awfulness of our own individual condition. Let us seek to realise the facts of our responsibility to God, our endless life somewhere, our capacity for joy or sorrow, for good or evil; and we shall find the thought that God will most surely require from us an account of our past lives, and of how far we have sought to fulfil the purpose of our being, a sufficiently serious and weighty one to occupy our minds without any additional burden. There is not a fact more clearly revealed in Scripture than that, at some time or other, in some form or other, "God shall judge the world by that man whom He hath appointed, whereof He hath given assurance to all men, in that He hath raised Him Forbid that such a revelation of

But much more wonderfully does the past seem to be restored to us, when we read the living thoughts of men long since dead. Time vanishes as we read or sing the Psalms of David. That life of thought and affection, of spiritual joy and sorrow, of deepest penitence and sublimest ecstasy which possessed him, seems no more past than a fountain is past when we drink of it far down the living stream that issues from its ever-welling heart. We do not require the past of David-of all that characterised him as a man of God: we possess it already. How truly immortal are the thoughts which once lived in men's souls, and have been expressed in words, by which they find an entrance to our from the dead."

His will should become to us mere words, or cease to be believed! For upon that "day" the talent of life must be accounted for, the work of life examined. Then shall the past be required: our past childhood from the time we acted as responsible beings; our past youth, with the history of the innumerable things which came to us from without, and were turned by us into good or evil within; our past manhood, with its manifold thoughts, desires, and actions moulded into habits, and shaped into character. A reckoning up shall be made of how and what we received, and how and what we bestowed; of the general tenour of our lives, as to how far we lived for God and for each other. We shall have to account for all we have been and done even down to our last breath, when some one whispered the words, soon to be spoken aloud to a wider or narrower circle, He is dead!—a fact this of little importance to the big and busy world, but of infinite importance to the solitary and silent man who has departed-how? and where? Inexpressibly solemn to the individual is the hour that closes his life. It is the end of a trial, when the evidence is complete, and nothing more is required in order that the sentence of Guilty or Not Guilty should be pronounced. He is, as it were, a great work finished; each year of his life being a large volume, each month a chapter, and each hour a page. And now nothing can be done to blot out a line, correct a sentence, or change a sentiment;-what is written is written! If a new period of probation be possible for those whose lives as a whole are expressed in their having “preferred darkness to light," that they "did not choose the fear of the Lord," and "would none of his counsels," no hint of such is given by Him who is to be the judge, but on the contrary warnings and declarations are given, implying the very reverse. And though Scripture were silent altogether, or even though it stated that new opportunities would be afforded, where is the hope from experience that those in the future would have a different result from those in the past?

And while this is a serious and solemn truth as regards life as a whole, it is solemn too as regards our life during even a single day. Let any one of us calmly review an ordinary day, much more one that may from its events be to us an extraordinary one, and let us recal, as far as we can, what we have done in it; estimate the many persons we have seen, conversed with, or in any way influenced; the good we have yielded ourselves to and accepted, or the evil, or thought of evil, we may I have entertained or followed; the time we may have misspent; what has been our character during the day, or any part of it;-and we shall be made to see what a large portion of life one day is, and how much it contains. And if we see this, however dimly, we shall also see more clearly how important is the fact that this one day is past, and forms an imperishable part of that history which God will require of us.

Now the thought that God will thus require an

account of our past lives, should lead us to attach great importance to the present; to see it in the serious light which truth imparts; and to act in it remembering that it is ever becoming the past, and will give its character to the past, which again reacts on the present, seeking in some form to reproduce itself. We should, therefore, endeavour so to fill up the present as not to be ashamed to meet it when as the past it is required of us by God. Some people are anxious, as they say, to kill time and to bury it out of sight, as if this dead could tell no tales, nor this murdered one rise to give evidence against its murderer. Oh, there is something singularly strange and sad in seeing responsible and immortal beings, to whom not one hour too many is given to educate them for immortality, wasting their strength and riches in contriving by what frivolity, by what refined selfishness, by what artistic combinations and arrangements, the present day, or the present week, can be got over! How will this conduct appear to them when God requires their past? Will it seem worthy in any respect of rational, responsible, immortal beings? of those who have heard of God, or have been taught the first elements of duty?

Still while I say this, I would by no means have you infer that the attaching of such importance to the present implies our taking a dark and gloomy view of existence, or the spending of our days as if some dread apparition were ever ready to appear, or as if some stern judge ruled the Universe, who is ever jealous of our happiness, and is ever watching to note our sins.

Truly, God has not so ordered His world that they who disregard His arrangements, and adopt plans of life of their own, regulated by different principles, and for different ends, shall enjoy more of existence, or fulfil a nobler destiny, than those who obey His will. What enjoyment can be reasonably desired in the present, which we will be ashamed to have recalled at judgment? What good is there to soul or body-what innocent recreation -what social happiness-which is not given by Him who gives us all things richly to enjoy ? And what He gives, and we receive in the form and spirit which are according to His will, we need never fear to have recalled. But if, on the other hand, we do fear, and rightly fear, to have anything summoned up from the past, we ought to fear to possess it in the present. But as for sadness and gloom in accepting all things from our Father-I will pay no such compliment to the devil! For such thoughts of God assume that the evil one, or the evil-doer, is more desirous to make us happy than our Creator, Preserver, and Redeemer. No man, indeed, has ever tasted the true blessedness of the present until he sees it in God's light, receives it from God's hand, and enjoys it in God's presence, with the reverence, the confidence, the peace of a child !

Let me more particularly ask you; now, to remember that in requiring our past lives as a whole, God

will require our past sins. How anxious, as I
have already hinted, are wrongdoers to remove
their sins into the past! As far as the east is from
the west, so far would they remove their sin from
their memory.
If it was only out of sight, they
think it would be out of mind. Let the dead
past, they say, bury its dead! So blind do they
become to the unseen, and to the very nature and
character of God, that in their hearts they exclaim,
"How doth God know!" Many a man who has
committed some grievous offence against society has
been so ashamed to meet his fellow men, and so
crushed by the insupportable burden of public
opinion, that he has fled to a foreign land. Pos-
sibly he could forget his crime were he not con-
stantly reminded of it by looks and words, by the
silence and coldness of friends, or by what has been
recorded in the public press, keeping his offence
fresh in men's minds, and indicating that his past
was required by every lover of justice. But a world
of iniquity of which society knows nothing is known
to God, as being to Him ever present. "Our secret
sins are in the light of His countenance." If we
doubt this, we shall be convinced of it at judgment.

Now past sins may be unrepented of, and unforgiven. If so, the past will be required only to condemn us. But if truly repented of, and if we have turned to God through faith in the blood of Jesus, "which cleanseth from all sin,” and given our hearts and lives to God with a full purpose of new obedience, and endeavour after it, then will our sins, though required, be to us as debts which have been cancelled; and while we recal them and all they deserved, we will also recal the mercy of God, who hath blotted them out for ever from His book of remembrance. "Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God."

shall not die, but what shattered health it has left behind! It is thus that the sinful past tells upon even the godly present, and lives in what we are not, but might have been. And will not our past in a real sense affect our eternal future even in glory? There are lessons that may be learned here, which cannot be learned there,-lessons of patience, meekness, and forgiveness; of faith long tried, but ever triumphing; and of self-sacrificing love for the glory of God and the good of man. Such lessons when learned will be an everlasting possession, filling the heart with adoring gratitude, to Him through whose wisdom and love it was here acquired. And thus it must be that in proportion to the use we make of our talents here will be our reward hereafter. (See Matt. xxv. 14-29.) All who believe in the Lord, and, believing, live, love, and serve, if but for an hour, are faithful servants; but some are more faithful than others, and necessarily enjoy more. But, blessed be God! whatever the past has been, it will never prevent all who have loved the Lord from singing the song of praise: "Thou hast redeemed us with thy blood, and made us kings and priests unto God, and we shall reign with thee! "

Oh! then, if you would not have a fearful looking for of judgment when the past is required, let the present evince a hearty repentance, through faith in Jesus, and a new life influenced by the love and fear of God.

Once more: God will require the good that is past, and it too will be found! The good never perishes. It is sometimes seen, as it were, rising out of the grave, where it seemed buried, to live again upon the earth and never more pass away. It is thus, as I have noticed, that the sayings of great men, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, which were uttered in a few minutes of time, have continued to be repeated ever since.

And so will there be, in some form, an immortality here to every good man. The better a man becomes, the less self-conscious is he of being good, or doing good. Like a healthy and strong man, who does not think about his health or strength, but enjoys and uses both, the Christian does not so much think of his love to God or of his spiritual strength, as enjoy the one and use the other. Nevertheless, his life of quiet goodness, manifested habitually in the common-place details of each returning hour, but which seems to him so poor, so miserable, so far short of what it ought to be and might have been-so unworthy at best of a child of God and the inheritor of such a property-all this past life of goodness, though now hid with Christ in God, will yet be required and “appear.” "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from

There is a form, however, in which past sins, even when forgiven, re-appear in our own personal history, and it is well to remember this in order to deepen in our hearts a sense of the loss we have suffered through them. But those who have found peace with God, and through His grace have entered on a new life, should have no morbid wish to recal their sins. Instead of always looking inward at them, they should rather look outward, and upward, and onward! Still, alas! the past is often recalled by its effects on present character. For how can any Christian avoid noticing the defects in his character and habits caused by a careless past? In his weak faith, dim views, evil thoughts, careless prayers; in his want of zeal and life; in his dwarfed, decrepit, and deformed soul,-in all these he sees the effects of past unbelief, procras-henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may tination, sloth, and self-indulgence; of evil habits of mind and body; of a long struggle against light, conviction, truth, and the indwelling of God's Spirit. The disease has been healed so that he

rest from their labours; and their works do follow them." The cup of cold water given in Christ's name; the small gift dropped into God's treasury by the poor widow; the visit to the sick and to the

« ForrigeFortsett »